REFORM UK has more members than the Conservative Party. Their website real-time membership clock clicked over the Tory total just in time for Nigel Farage to announce it on the slow-news Boxing Day.
On the face of it, this has to be good news for Farage and his attempt to “do a Trump” in the UK. But on its own, this is no guarantee that Farage will eclipse the Conservative Party and win the next General Election on a tide of anti-Starmer sentiment.
First, Reform UK members are an amorphous lot. It’s going to be very difficult to elaborate a programme for national Government which suits them all. They could easily crumble as quickly as UKIP did.
Second, having lots of members is only going to help you win an election if those members are prepared to knock the doors and persuade people to vote for you – month in, month out for at least a couple of years. Reform UK members may just want to wear the badge. They have no historic loyalties that will make the hard slog of party-building attractive.
Third, any electoral success on the part of Reform UK would depend on the other parties losing. Elections take place in a context. Results are not based on whether you have followed a blueprint: again, look at the demise of UKIP, once Brexit had been won.
The Conservative Party is an uneasy coalition, but the 2024 General Election result is more likely to get the core loyal members out campaigning, to restore their fortunes. There will come a time when voters begin to forget the catastrophe and the Boris and subsequent leaderships and become more interested in the next Government, not the last one. Tory voters know that their 2024 protest vote – whether it was an abstention or a vote loaned to Reform – let in a Labour Government, and a new generation of aspirant Tories want those marginal seats back.
The Labour Party is less of a coalition and more of a dictatorship. While its Leader and his mates are doing their best to alienate the voters, a bit of luck with the economy may allow Labour to hang on to most of its seats. With their large majority, they can afford to hand some of those marginals back to the Tories, just as Blair did at each General Election after his 1997 landslide.
This all leaves Reform UK still having to climb a mountain before they could win a majority of seats in the House of Commons. What is more of a bother than their chances at the next General Election is the effect Reform UK will have on the current Government, not the next one.
Reform banging on about all our troubles being down to immigration is dragging all the parties to the right on a range of policies. The Tories and Labour are both locked into promises to stop immigrants arriving in small boats from across the Chanel and limiting legal routes for migrants to enter the UK. “These immigrants are all taking your jobs,” they chorus – at the same time as they are painting the immigrants as benefit scroungers. Farage is winning members because he offers easy answers – “it’s got to stop” – just like Donald Trump.
Labour and the Tories should be standing up to the racism at the root of Reform UK’s policies, and offering better alternatives. It is the way that they have been crumbling under the onslaught of Reform UK that has made the UK’s two major mainstream parties his biggest recruitment officer.
●The BBC published political party memberships at the end of 2023, based on publicly available information. •Labour 370,450 (down 37,000 in 2023, down from a peak of 532,046 at the end of 2019) •Conservatives’ income from membership fees down from £1.97m to £1.5m (they don’t publish the actual figures) •Liberal Democrats 86,599 (down by around 11,000) •Green Party 53,000 (stable) •Reform UK: “significant growth” •Scottish National Party 64,525 (down 18,000 from 2022 and down from 125,691 in 2019)
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